Job flows and worker flows: a reappraisal #Job flows scaled down and only moderately linked to worker flows

Job flows (job creations and job destructions) and worker flows (hires and quits) are central to recent analysis of labor market. The scale of gross job flows (creations + destructions) compared to net job flows (creations - destructions) has a part in the renewal of Schumpeterian analysis. It is usually accepted that gross job flows are roughly of the same magnitude in such different countries as France and the USA. This study takes advantage of the possibility to follow employees for two years - thanks to the DADS database - and improves the measure of job flows by eliminating spurious flows related to plant's identifier changes. Thus job flows are divided by two and appear to be by far less important in France than in the USA. The same database allows the study of the link between job flows and worker flows. Churning flows (worker flows minus job flows) depend more on industry characteristics than on job flows. Their magnitude, scaled up by this study, reflects more the segmentation of the labor market than the strength of the creative destruction process.